Pearson_Martin. So You Want To

7/23/2019 Pearson_Martin. So You Want To

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SO YOU WANT TO BE A SPACE-FLIER?by Martin Pearson

SO YOU WANT to be a space-flier?

My friend, if you only knew what you are asking for. Life in a space ship is nojoke. Nor is it a thrilling adventure. You're all alone there; you get tired ofreading. You can't play cards and the like because, first, there's no one withwhom to play and, second, because the cards won't stay put. There's nothing tosee; space scenery is sheer monotony. The whole ship smells; cooking's a rotten, messy job and the after effects are still more so.Picture me after I'm about ten days out from Mars, approaching Earth. I stillhave five more days to go, am getting into the last sick-and-tired stage ofspace-flying. I've read everything in the microfilm box on the way out; for thereturn trip there's only a few rolls I picked up at Marsport, books writtenabout a hundred years ago, dealing with some writer's idea of space-flying and

life on Mars. Naturally, the author knew nothing of his subject.Oh, those stories about giant spaceships, big crews, Martian princesses, spacepirates, grotesque and malignant space-beings! The first day, they were amusing; the second day funny, the third day just silly, and the fourth day, I thoughtthem specimens of sheer stupidity. By the tenth day, I was positive that thosewriters were lunatics who had barely managed to keep from being put away.Picture my ship in contrast to the nonsense this maniac dished out a centuryago. There weren't any fine gravity plates so that I could walk a deck with asmuch ease as if I were at home on Earth. Gravity plates could be done, butthey'd raise havoc with drive belts, make your course impossible to figure,attract thousands of meteors, which would turn the ship into a sieve before youwere two hours out. So, there weren't any fancy gravity plates.

You know what it feels like? It feels like fading. Like falling down an endlessand bottomless elevator shaft out of which all the air has been pumped. Yourorgans are drifting around; you have difficulty in swallowing, and every once in awhile you forget yourself and think you are really falling, flail out in alldirections with consequent damage. Then, when you sleep--oh, when you sleep! You dream of falling. From the second you close your eyes to the instant you wakeup, yelling your head off, you're falling off a cliff, about to be splatteredall over the ground. Sleeping in space is sheer hell.Not that it's much better when you're awake. There's still no gravity, remember.

That means, I floated around in mid-air looking like a goldfish in a bowl. Onlynot as comfortable; the goldfish is in its element. I had no right-side up, notop or bottom. Not being built for that sort of thing (for, like it or not,humans are constructed for planets, not free space) even an experienced spacerlike myself keeps bumping his head, shins, shoulders, funny bone, or stomachinto things--not to mention things bumping into him. Yeah, there's no weight,true: but things still have their mass and that spells sheer misery. You haveEarth muscles, adapted to Earth conditions; no matter how much space-trainingyou have had, you can't go easy all the time. All that training can do for youis give you an idea what you'll be up against. A spaceman won't run into onetenth the grief that an untrained person would, but the thing is still hellish.Because, every now and then, you forget and move just a little too fast, thenslam bang into something. No matter how careful you are, after a few days you're

a mass of bruises.Everything that isn't battened down floats. A roll of microfilm hanging near the



cook stove, a caged frying pan floating along near the porthole, pillowsdrifting around in an orbit by the light, old shirts and gadgets. At first, youdecide that this thing won't happen; you'll put everything away, fix it so youwon't have to worry about its drifting loose. After a few days, your outlook has changed on that. Taking things out and putting them away, as often as you have

to do it, is gruelling labor. The slightest slip of muscles and you're dartingin one direction while the object shoots off in the opposite direction.And then there's debris. Little crumbs of food; like globules of liquid. You'llbe careful, you think; you won't spill anything, eh? Think carefully: ever seeanyone eating back on Earth who didn't spill something, or drop something,somewhere during the meal? Just a crumb, or a little drop of water, perhaps. But that, buddy, is all you need to spill or drop in space. These crumbs, these tiny droplets of water, don't fall to the tablecloth; they don't fall at all.They float. They form into perfect little globes, if they're liquid, and take up

an orbit, perfect little planets. If they're crumbs of food, then they becomeminiature meteors or planetoids.Cooking has to be done in the single room allowed for living in your space ship. Even though your food is mostly canned stuff, concentrated, there's enough thatisn't. Water keeps escaping from you; hot coffee is murderous. You have to keepit in a closed container while it's boiling; you have to leave it there until it cools sufficiently to drink. Then you suck it out through a drinking valve inthe pot, directly into your mouth. You can't pour it, because it won't pour inspace. If it got loose, you'd have a big ball of coffee, boiling hot; it woulddrift around, wetting and scalding everything it touched. And you'd run intoplenty of grief trying to capture it.

Now re-picture the space ship, ten days out. Dozens of globes, tiny, oft-timesvirtually invisible, of water, crumbs, food, etc., floating about, getting inyour eyes, your nose, your hair. Then, a final touch is added by theventilation. You see, there isn't any.The air is purified and re-purified as in submarines. Chemically, it's stillbreathable and that's all the designers wanted to know. But, to put it crudely,the air stinks. The air is foul and it stays foul. The smell of everythingyou've cooked remains in full strength. Living there doesn't help theatmosphere, either.AFTER FIFTEEN days in a chamber like this, you are sick. You have a case of BOand halitosis such as no Listerine advertiser ever dreamed of in his palmiestdays. Your digestion is shot to pieces; your muscles lack exercise, and youreyes are bleary from too much reading, or too much looking at the practicallyunshielded glare of the stars outside.Then there's the little matter of temperature. As a rule, there are two kinds of temperature on a spaceship. Too hot or too cold. The outside of the ship is half black and half mirrored. You regulate the temperature by juggling the gyroscopein the engine room until the ship has swung one of those sides to the sun. Ifit's the black side, then you absorb heat; if it's the mirror side, then theheat is reflected away. By varying you should get your norm--should,theoretically. Actually, you don't. Not as a rule. You think you have thingsjust right and go to sleep (falling off a cliff in your dreams); while you'rehaving your nightmares, the ship has swung slightly on its own axis and you wake

up (screaming) either half frozen or half roasted.And, you know, there's nothing to do on a spaceship, outside of keeping alive.



That's what finally gets you. But there couldn't be two people, even if theships were made larger. Under those conditions, two people would hate each other in a week and murder each other before the voyage was over. Three or more people would be impossible.Well, you ask yourself, why one man then? First of all, let's touch on

generalities.The course of a space-ship is all figured out by mathematics before it leavesthe planet. The weight is calculated down to the last gram, including crew ofone, food, and so on. The exact second for starting, flight, figures on theorbit the ship will follow, the orbit of Earth, the orbit of Mars--preciselywhere both planets will be at the moment of starting, where they will be thefirst day, the second day, etc., midpoint, and when the ship arrives. Plusresearch on the orbits of about three thousand asteroids, meteor swarms, themoon, comets, the sun, the other planets.It takes about a week of solid calculation by trained mathematicians andsuper-machines to work out all the factors. Humans alone could never do it. When

the ship is dispatched, its course is fixed on its control. It doesn't require a single human hand in operation; no human hand could possibly be as exact ascontrol timing requires. Once in space you don't navigate; you couldn't possibly figure out your exact speed and position. All you can do is sit around wondering whether or not someone made a mistake, or if, perhaps, a wheel slipped somewhere in the calculating machines. If anything did go wrong, then it's curtains foryou.So, what's the one man for? Well, in case of accidents--minor accidents--he canbe useful. He can put out fires, prevent cargo from shifting, keep the ship from

absorbing too much heat in any one spot, thus damaging the cargo and records, or keep the ship from freezing solid in spots, thus ruining the mechanism. And,after the ship has reached a point of about one hundred miles off the surface of the planet, the space-man lands the ship.But, out in space, there's nothing more you can do. Keeping the temperaturesteady doesn't require attention; you know it when it hits extremes. You don'tnavigate; you don't take readings, and you don't have to swab the decks or clean the place or oil the engines. You couldn't.On the whole, the life of the spaceflier is easily the dullest, most dreary andsickening, irritating, and unhealthy life you can get. That's why there's always an opening for applicants; it's also why few of them last a year. When you getback from a flight, you're as weak as if you spent the time strapped to a bed;you can barely walk; your digestion is ruined and you're filthy, groggy, andsmelly. Your eyes are bad; your lungs are bad, and your stomach's bad. Your skin is ruined; you've the hair and beard of a hermit. Shaving is impossible underno-gravity conditions, and the no-gravity treatment for baldness is unbeatable.You're ornery anti-social, and grumpy when you get back. A 100% sourpuss. You're poison to your friends and family. It takes days really to get clean, and, until

you do, no one wants to come near you; in comparison, the camel is asweet-smelling, pleasant beast. There is no camaraderie among space-men. You



can't make friends on the job, and there's nothing to talk about, for all yousee on Mars is a small, dusty space-port out in the desert. Everyone has readabout that.And you don't have adventures. If you did, no one would ever know because youcouldn't possibly live to return and tell about it. Space ships whose allottedcourse is changed, for any reason at all, just never return.So when I read that people, a hundred years or so back, around the '30s and '40s

of last century, thought space-fliers would be great heroic guys and wished they could become spacemen, I have to laugh. Only not because I think it's funny. Itisn't. No wonder they called these people romantics; they just didn't know anybetter. I wish I could find me one of the time machines they have in some oftheir stories, so I could let them in on the inside dope.So you want to be a space-flier, eh? You're welcome to it, buddy; as for me, Iknow when I've had enough.

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Pearson_Martin. So You Want To